Since the mid-20th century, organizational theorists have increasingly distanced themselves from the study of core societal power centers and important policy issues of the day. This title addresses the global financial crisis debates.

Since the mid-20th century, organizational theorists have increasingly distanced themselves from the study of core societal power centers and important policy issues of the day. This title addresses the global financial crisis debates and struggles around how to organize economies and societies around the world.

The unprecedented rise and fall in silver's price during 1979 and 1980 resulted in charges against the Hunt brothers of Dallas of monopolization and market manipulation, charges which led to a lengthy trial. This book focuses on the economic analysis used at this trial. Drawing upon interviews with the judge, jury, attorneys and expert witnesses (the author having so served), it investigates the elusive definition of manipulation in sophisticated markets, the difficulties of interpreting statistical evidence, the imprecision in calculating damages, the hidden assumptions behind inferences concerning intent, and the hazards introduced when economic analysis enters complex litigation. The author concludes that these problems induce courtroom procedures to oversimplify the economic analysis and cause the law on market manipulation to be created retroactively. Yet the failure lies not with the legal institutions but with the futures exchanges who had not developed in advance the rules to minimize large-scale trading during the unusual price moves.

How do we know which social and economic policies work, which should be continued, and which should be changed? Jim Manzi argues that throughout history, various methods have been attempted -- except for controlled experimentation. Experiments provide the feedback loop that allows us, in certain limited ways, to identify error in our beliefs as a first step to correcting them. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, scientists invented a methodology for executing controlled experiments to evaluate certain kinds of proposed social interventions. This technique goes by many names in different contexts (randomized control trials, randomized field experiments, clinical trials, etc.). Over the past ten to twenty years this has been increasingly deployed in a wide variety of contexts, but it remains the red-haired step child of modern social science. This is starting to change, and this change should be encouraged and accelerated, even though the staggering complexity of human society creates severe limits to what social science could be realistically expected to achieve. Randomized trials have shown, for example, that work requirements for welfare recipients have succeeded like nothing else in encouraging employment, that charter school vouchers have been successful in increasing educational attainment for underprivileged children, and that community policing has worked to reduce crime, but also that programs like Head Start and Job Corps, which might be politically attractive, fail to attain their intended objectives. Business leaders can also use experiments to test decisions in a controlled, low-risk environment before investing precious resources in large-scale changes -- the philosophy behind Manzi's own successful software company. In a powerful and masterfully-argued book, Manzi shows us how the methods of science can be applied to social and economic policy in order to ensure progress and prosperity.

Is democracy as we know it in danger? More and more we confront one another as aggrieved groups rather than as free citizens. Deepening cynicism, the growth of corrosive individualism, statism, and the loss of civil society are warning signs that democracy may be incapable of satisfying the yearnings it itself unleashes - yearnings for freedom, fairness, and equality. In her 1993 CBC Massey Lectures, political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain delves into these complex issues to evaluate democracy's chances for survival.

Featuring five famous trials, this book examines the way our right to a fair trial can be threatened, when people are tempted to abandon their principles in the name of safety. Trials included are the Salem Witch Trials, the Haymarket Affair Trial, the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the trial of Alger Hiss, and the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui--the latter not yet covered extensively in any book.